On the stage of Dramatyczny Theatre in Wałbrzych, acclaimed theatrical duo Demirski / Strzępka staged O dobru/ On Goodness, a performance about the state of affairs of contemporary theatre and its role in public life.
On Goodness results from the artists’ involvement in protests against cuts in subsidies and the replacement of artistic theatre directors with managers. The main slogan of the protest was "Theatre is not a product, a viewer is not a client.”
On Goodness resembles a postmodern collage. It consists of familiar media stories of provocations, successes and failures. It is also an ironic tale of those who have succeeded, but paid a high price for their success. Paweł Demirski created, as he describes it, a 'delicate, lukewarm narrative', which combines the personal stories of actors and real-life characters from the world of media and politics: Amy Winehouse, Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and a female politician with a hairstyle á la Julia Tymoshenko. (Karolina Wycisk, Nowa Siła Krytyczna)
Embeded gallery style
display gallery as slider
Demirski and Strzępka state clearly that media structures call for change, that communication strategies in public spaces need strong interference, and, above all, they require down-to-earth and firm debaters (...) The discussion about the protest turned into something of a debate about the language, from which you can learn, for instance, that it is inappropriate for the director who received a Polityka’s Passport – as if for the Lady – to swear. Culture has its own rules. And the artists negotiate them by sabotaging media space with their language, lacking euphemisms (Dorota Kowalkowska, Dwutygodnik.com )
Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski became notorious for their speech about the disastrous situation of Polish culture, given during the gala for the 2010 Polityka’s Passport Award. They received the award in the category of theatre, granted "for consistently developed critical theatre projects, the courage to speak more and more sharply than we would like to hear, and for the spontaneous theatricality that breaks the barriers of 'good taste' in the name of 'good thinking".
Source: teatr.walbrzych.pl, polityka.pl, ed.LS, transl.GS